CEO Chatter: Web Presence & Consistency

I read an infographic not too long back on Entrepreneur.com which was entirely about the world we live in today and how that world views businesses based on its web presence and technology. And a statistic stuck, forever cemented, in my brain – “75 percent of people will evaluate if a business if legit based on its social media presence.”

Seventy-five percent! Three-quarters of our population will decide whether your business is legal and not a scam based on how often and how frequent you post to social media. WOW! This blew my mind. I knew when I started Cloud Friday that I wanted a strong social media presence for our company, but I wanted to set that up as a resource for our clients and readers alike. Not as a means to validate our legitimacy as a company. But, low and behold, the end result – gaining trust and reputation to strangers of the internet. Don’t mind if I do!

So what’s this mean for the small business owner? It means putting forth a consistent effort and/or hiring a company to keep an internet presence going, and in so doing you, you will gain reputation and trust among your readers.

Here are some things that Cloud Friday does for our internet presence, and maybe that’ll help you!

We are a Google platform company, so that means we use Google Drive, Google Docs, and Google Sheets. Yay for Google! All employees of Cloud Friday work from their homes (also yay for technology), so with that we share everything we do related to social media and our blog in Drive. We use Docs for the blog posts and Sheets for our “schedules.”

Schedules – we have two Sheets –

One is to outline and plan our blogs posts for the year. We post a blog once weekly. That means we have 52 lines on our Sheet, and that gives us the ability to plan for the quarterly topics and the planned posts at least a couple weeks out. Sometimes Ty, our main blog writer, will be able to write two at a time, so this gives her to ability to get ahead. Also, it allows me to know when I have to CEO Chatter, so I can block time on my calendar.

The second one is to plan our social media presence for the week, which is almost always based on the blog topic. Our social media guru is Jenna, and she is quick to fill out the Sheet, which lets her see on one page that there aren’t any holes in our plan. Oh! And the Sheet is always the same – 2 posts on Monday (11am all platforms and 5pm Twitter), 2 posts on Tuesday (12pm Twitter and 5pm Twitter), and so on and so forth. This ensures Jenna will hit the platforms at the right times, and help Cloud Friday stay consistent.

We use Buffer to schedule out the social media posts each week. Once Jenna completes her Sheet for the week, she jumps into Buffer and copies all to appropriate scheduled spot in that software. Buffer is pretty amazing – you can set up a schedule so it will only have spots available as you require and it also shows you post analytics. So you can re-share the popular posts from time to time and save yourself from creating new content constantly.

We also use Boosting on Facebook. Jenna will find based on the analytics the most popular post from the month past, and boost it! This does cost additional money but it’s a limited amount. So you can decide what you want to spend to boost each week (or month, we boost weekly), and Facebook will stop the boost when your limit has been reached. Simple!

Lastly, when there is a comment or mention, we respond immediately. It’s like a full team effort, all hands on deck. We never let a comment or mention go unanswered. When that happens, that means our community is chatting with us and we want that interaction. That’s super important to us. And it should be to you. ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS respond timely. With mobile phones and apps, there’s no reason not to.

So that about sums up what we do for our online presence at Cloud Friday.

If a small business owner is not in the position to be able to handle this themselves, we do offer the service too. And trust me when I say, what you see above is how we handle our clients work as well.

So if you like what we do and have enjoyed our content, then you’d get the same service – consistency and frequency. We hope this helps!